by Alex Evans | Aug 2, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development
The perennially popular board game Monopoly is a reasonable simulacrum of capitalism. At the beginning of the game, players move around a commons and try to privatise as much as they can. The player who privatizes the most invariably wins.
But Monopoly has two features currently lacking in American capitalism: all players start with th same amount of capital, and all receive $200 each time they circle the board. Absent these features, the game would lack fairness and excitement, and few would choose to play it.
Peter Barnes in the superb Capitalism 3.0. Go buy.
by Alex Evans | Aug 1, 2010 | North America
“I have this gnawing feeling about the future of America. When people lose the sense of optimism, things tend to get more volatile. The future I most fear for America is Latin American: a grossly unequal society that is prone to wild swings from populism to orthodoxy, which makes sensible government increasingly hard to imagine. Look at the Tea Party. People think it came from nowhere. While I don’t agree with their remedies, most Tea Party members are middle-class Americans who have been suffering silently for years.”
– Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, quoted in Ed Luce’s outstanding FT Magazine article yesterday on the crisis of middle-class America.
